This how-to guide describes how to set up automatic machine-based translations for content on a Drupal site. Whenever a node is created, translation jobs will be created for every language specified, and depending on how you set up your translator, you should be able to completely automate the translation process. For this project we are using SDL, but you should be able to use other translators.
1. Download and enable the translation management modules. This can be done through Drush or through the modules interface in drupal.
drush dl -y tmgmtdrush dl -y tmgmt_sdl_beglobaldrush en -y... More

Drupal 8 is almost here, and it’s bringing big front-end improvements, including new methods to display data on mobile devices using breakpoints, build flexible templates in Twig and better management for tools and libraries.
Most importantly, changes to the display layer mean that Drupal has become much more agile and extendable for Front-end Developers.
The journey so far
Up till now, Front-end Developers have been working with a display layer that was originally introduced in Drupal 4.5, here’s how it worked...
PHPtemplate engine - Drupal 7 and its predecessors
The first real concept of... More

As a Drupal developer for 7 years, I’ve shed plenty of (mostly figurative) blood, sweat, and tears over the sites and modules I’ve built. At Acquia, I work on our Cloud tools, making sure my fellow developers never have to worry about many of the issues I used to deal with constantly. There are three basic areas where Acquia Cloud makes developers’ lives better.
“Don’t make me think about hosting”
The Acquia Cloud platform is fully managed, meaning you don’t have to... More

Protecting your staging and development environments is nearly as important as protecting your production server. There are several ways to do this, including adding modules to your sites or modifying your settings.php file.
Add a module
The preferred method of website protection is to add either the Secure Site module or the Shield module to password protect your website. While both modules offer this basic protection feature, the Search Site module... More

Welcome to the 8th and FINAL installment of an 8-part blog series we're calling "The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8." Whether you're a site builder, module or theme developer, or simply an end-user of a Drupal website, Drupal 8 has tons in store for you! This blog series will attempt to enumerate the major changes in Drupal 8.
Please note that since Drupal 8 is still under active development, some of the details below may change prior to its release. Still, since Drupal 8 is now feature-frozen, hopefully most info should remain relevant. Where... More

Composer
Today's article is all about a fabulous tool for dependency management in your PHP projects. Composer solves the problem where you add a library to your application but it depends on this specific version of some other library, which also uses the yaml stuff, which needs ... you get the picture!
Composer helps us keep track of what external code our application relies on, and get it installed the right way on every copy of that application. This article will show you how to use Composer successfully in your own projects.
Get Composer
Composer is cross-platform and... More

Welcome to the 7th installment of an 8-part blog series we're calling "The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8." Whether you're a site builder, module or theme developer, or simply an end-user of a Drupal website, Drupal 8 has tons in store for you! This blog series will attempt to enumerate the major changes in Drupal 8.
Please note that since Drupal 8 is still under active development, some of the details below may change prior to its release. Still, since Drupal 8 is now feature-frozen, hopefully most info should remain relevant. Where applicable, Drupal... More

On Acquia’s Support team, we see all sorts of issues every day. Many are unique to the particular purpose and configuration of a site, but there are a variety of issues that can appear on even the most well-built and meticulously maintained web applications. We see these often enough that they are among the first things we look for when a site goes down or begins to experience specific symptoms, and we are often able to resolve them quickly precisely because we have learned from experience what will and what will not work.
Our experiences also help us understand what kinds of obstacles can... More

Every developer has a slightly different approach to building their Drupal sites. I’ve tried just about every approach, and they all have their merits, but my favorite is Drush Make. Before joining Acquia, I didn’t realize Acquia Cloud supported Drush Make, but I was delighted to discover that I was wrong. Assuming I’m not the only person who had missed this fact, I wanted to spend a little time highlighting where this exists and how I’m using it.
Getting to the Goods... More

Some of the great news in Drupal 8 development was the introduction of web services directly in core, allowing other applications to interact with Drupal to consume exposed information or services without the need to install contributed modules.
Let’s look at the list of modules that ship with D8 core related with web services:
RESTful Web Services module in core exposes entities in different defined endpoints, while Serialization module allow to serialize entities in formats like HAL+JSON, XML, JSON. I will basically use these four modules in this blog post together with Rest UI (... More

Welcome to the 6th installment of an 8-part blog series we're calling "The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8." Whether you're a site builder, module or theme developer, or simply an end-user of a Drupal website, Drupal 8 has tons in store for you! This blog series will attempt to enumerate the major changes in Drupal 8.
Please note that since Drupal 8 is still under active development, some of the details below may change prior to its release. Still, since Drupal 8 is now feature-frozen, hopefully most info should remain relevant. Where applicable, Drupal... More

In this post, I will share my experience on trying to learn Drupal 8 during its alpha stage, talk about some of the challenges of keeping up with the ongoing changes while trying to learn it, and end with some tips and resources which proved useful for me.
How it began
During a few weeks, a group of colleagues and I embarked on a learning project to get up to speed on all things Drupal 8. We did not fully know what to expect given that we were starting this at a time when D8 was still in Alpha and changes (even big ones) kept coming daily.
So, my... More

In today’s super-competitive marketplace, staying ahead of the competition means being able to respond to changing markets instantly. Launching a new marketing campaign, a new brand, or even a new family of brands can mean the difference between success…or trailing the pack. Acquia Cloud Site Factory offers a turnkey solution for deploying one site—or hundreds of sites—quickly and efficiently, without sacrificing the branded experience expected by your visitors.
Today, I want to talk about how Site Factory turns your... More

If you're doing Drupal development, having a local sandbox is a necessity. Why? No one should be making untested changes on a production or staging server. And, a development server should be free of initial development errors where the developer should execute a small set of engineering tests before deployment. Plus, it can be time consuming to regularly deploy code developed locally onto a development server. To summarize: a local sandbox is absolutely best practice. I hope to summarize how to quickly get up to speed without having to rehash the lessons I have learned.
Disclaimer
This blog... More

Originally posted on Yellow Pencil's blog. Follow @kimbeaudin on Twitter
Here is the deal
Drupal generally runs on a LAMP based setup (which I strongly recommend), but if clients are restricted to certain hardware and software, sometimes you have to make it work with what you've got. On a recent Drupal 7 project of ours, our clients wanted to use their in-house setup on Windows Servers with IIS and a MS SQL database back-end. With a bit of research,... More

We all know Varnish is awesome. I went as far as presenting a topic on Varnish then writing about it. This is a known fact.
However, what happens to all that caching goodness when you want to run your entire site over SSL? Out of the box, Varnish doesn't support it. While I've heard some mention that not supporting SSL is an oversight,... More

In a previous job, I had a boss that I really admired. He's near the end of his career and his experience had made him wise. He was humble, but would chime in as needed. One of my favorites was his ability to bust out short one-liners that would hit the nail on the head. Around the water cooler, we regularly discussed open source. Here are some worth mentioning:
Free like a puppy
This one always made me chuckle. But, it's true in so many ways.
I look at the open source community. At times, people's evaluations of open source tools are skin deep. "Ah, they are free!". This typically follows... More

Acquia is constantly working to improve our service offerings, and that means cleaning up existing features and adding new ones that we know will make a big difference in people’s workflow for the better. Despite the scale of some of these improvements, they’re not always immediately visible at first glance, so I’ve taken a bit of time to highlight three recent ones.
Log Streaming:
We’ve talked about log streaming in previous blogs when it was in beta, but we’re now taking it out of beta after very positive feedback during the beta period. I’ve been using this... More

Cross-posted with permission from Dave Hall Consulting
The Acquia Cloud API makes it easy to manage sites on the platform. The API allows you to perform many administrative tasks including creating, destroying and copying databases, deploying code, managing domains and copying files.
Acquia offers 2 official clients. The primary client is a drush plugin which can only be downloaded from... More

Cross-posted with permission from nerdstein
The Migrate module is, hands down, the defacto way to migrate content in Drupal. The only knock against it, is the learning curve. All good things come to those who take the time and learn it.
I have summarized some tips and tricks I have learned. Thank you to Mike Ryan and Alex Ward for... More

Cross-posted with permission from Genuine InteractiveLes is a web applications engineer at Genuine Interactive. He is a frequent Drupal community contributor. Genuine’s PHP team works on projects in a range of industries from CPG, B2B, financial services, and more.
As a contributor to the Drupal community, this post will detail Les’ method for enforcing Drupal coding standards by using the Coder and Coder Review modules: Drush and Git... More

Cross-posted with permission from OHO.com
OHO’s Dave Sawyer recently co-presented Collaborative Spaces: Integrating Drupal with Google Drive, Dropbox, and More at DrupalCon Austin. The session provided a how-to on creating a more collaborative experience by bridging the gap between the content that is managed in Drupal, and the documents, files, and conversations that are exchanged outside of Drupal in services... More